Frankly My Dear, Russians Do Give a Damn

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY,

Published: August 29, 1994

MOSCOW, Aug. 28—
American fans of Margaret Mitchell's classic novel, "Gone With the Wind," had to content themselves with one authorized sequel, Alexandra Ripley's 1991 best seller, "Scarlett." But at almost any Moscow bookstand, Russian readers can buy such tantalizing offerings as "We Call Her Scarlett," "The Secret of Scarlett O'Hara," "Rhett Butler," "The Secret of Rhett Butler" and "The Last Love of Scarlett."

Most of these sequels are attributed to a writer named Yuliya Hilpatrik, but there is something singularly gloomy and Slavic about many of the plot lines. In "The Last Love of Scarlett," for example, almost everybody dies, including Scarlett and Rhett.

That may be because Yuliya Hilpatrik is a pseudonym with an Irish flavor of some 30 Russian and Belarussian writers in Minsk who jointly crank out story after story based on the setting and characters in "Gone With the Wind," as well as dozens of other unauthorized sequels and novelizations. Most of the writers are men, and they are unsentimental about the enduring romance of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

"We are just doing it to make extra money," said Vladimir Adamchik, a Belarussian writer who with his brother Miroslav created the sequel cottage industry in Minsk. "I don't have a favorite. I like them all as long as they are making money." No. 2 Best Seller

And they are. In the first two weeks of August, "We Call Her Scarlett," by Yuliya Hilpatrik, was No. 2 on the best-seller list compiled by Book Business, a Russian weekly magazine on publishing. All over Moscow, likenesses of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, in varying states of rapture, gaze up from vendors' tables. Wholesale copies sell for about $2 to $3 -- almost twice the price of a copy of Ms. Ripley's "Scarlett" -- and for that matter, Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov."

"I've never heard of anything like this," said Marcie Posner, a vice president and director of international rights at the William Morris Agency, which represents the Margaret Mitchell estate. "It's unbelievable." She added that the sequels are illegal because under American law characters are copyrighted.

American readers might not immediately recognize Mitchell's devilishly debonair hero in the tormented incarnation wrought by Mr. Adamchik's team of writers. On page 182 of "The Last Love of Scarlett," Rhett Butler sounds more like Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment" as he is overtaken by self-loathing after yet another fight with Scarlett:

"Rhett, not even glancing at his wife, silently pulled a revolver from his writing desk and forced it into Scarlett's hand.

" 'Do what I tell you.'

" 'But Rhett, I . . .'

" 'Just do it, shoot, Scarlett! I don't want to live any longer, I'm fed up with it all!' he said in a horribly despondent voice."

He lives, but Scarlett dies on page 202.

Mr. Adamchik, a poet whose works have appeared in Russian literary magazines, declined to explain exactly how his team of writers collaborates on the books or devises plots, saying it was a "commercial secret." But business has been good enough to permit Mr. Adamchik to go to Barcelona, Spain, for 20 days to relax and write poetry.

He chose Spain, he said, because "I am continuing the tradition of Hemingway."

Mr Adamchik's group also publishes novelizations, including lurid renditions of the popular soap opera "Santa Barbara" and of countless Clint Eastwood movies.

Making sequels of literature and film is of course nothing new. Partly inspired by the vast success of "Scarlett," agents have signed up authors to write continuations of everything from "Star Trek" to the novels of Jane Austen.

But most authors and publishers zealously guard their copyrights to such sequels. When pastiches of "Gone With the Wind" began appearing in France and Italy, Ms. Posner said, the estate's lawyers took their authors to court and won.

The Russian interpretations are the most blatant to date. The Russian Government passed legislation in 1993 that seeks to protect intellectual property and authors' rights and stem the tidal wave of pirated books, cassettes and movies that began flooding the Russian market after Communism collapsed. But the laws are rarely enforced.

Taking Mr. Adamchik and his colleagues to court would be particularly difficult, Russian experts said, because the unauthorized sequels are not outright piracy since they can in some way be considered original creations, however derivative.

"We decided not to go after them because we realized it would go nowhere," said Gennadi Kusminov, a spokesman for Authors and Publishers Against Piracy, a society that represents 20 different Russian publishers.

And Mr. Adamchik, whose publishing company in Minsk is named Badppr did not appear worried. "I don't think I am doing anything criminal," he said. "There has been a lot of talk about it," he added, referring to the illlegality of his work, "but nobody has complained to me personally."

But his Moscow distributors spoke uneasily of the practice. "We had our suspicions," said Nikolai A. Naumenko, a senior editor at the AST publishing house in Moscow, which distributed several of the sequels. "They couldn't convince us it was a completely legitimate venture."

He complained that the books were poorly written and conceded that they were probably not entirely within the letter of Russian law. But, he added, they were very profitable. Apologetically, he added that the Russian publishing business was still "less civilized" than the West's. He promised to reform. "We now have the possibility to do some good books in a legal way," he said. "We have stopped working with those people."

An editor at a rival publishing house that also distributes "Gone With the Wind" sequels was even more disapproving of the serial writers. "I think these people should be thrown in jail," said Natalya, an editor of children's literature at the Erika publishing house, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used. "They and others like them have lowered the literacy rate of this country."

But it seems that the Slavic appetite for tales of Tara, cotillions and Southern gentlemen cannot be slaked.

Olga, a saleswoman at the Olympic Stadium book market here, a vast emporium where street vendors and bookstore owners buy books wholesale, said Russians worship Margaret Mitchell. She sells the work of imitators, but with dismay. "In my view, there is only one 'Gone With the Wind,' " she said. "The rest is just about money."

Under Communism, ordinary Russians rarely had an opportunity to read "Gone With the Wind," because only books by state-approved Soviet writers were widely circulated. The 1939 classic film version was not shown in Russia until 1991 and became an instant sensation. It was shown at one Moscow movie theater for an entire year. So many pirated translations of Ms. Ripley's "Scarlett" appeared on the Russian market that when the official translation finally made it into bookstores, it sold poorly.

Russian intellectuals complain bitterly about the incessant infusion of lowbrow Western culture that such adaptations and novelizations represent. But there are signs that highbrow Russian publishers are also getting into the sequel market. Vagrius, one of Russia's most respectable publishing houses, recently signed an author to write a sequel to Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

Senior editors at Vagrius refused to divulge the identity of the author selected to prolong Tolstoy's greatest and longest novel. "War and Peace II," they say, will be published under a pseudonym. "We have to keep it secret," said a senior editor, Gleb Uspensky. "To Russians, Tolstoy is a god. People would burn the author's house down."

Photo: Covers of the many popular Russian sequels to "Gone With the Wind." (Gleb Kosorukov for The New York Times)